[admin_only] Improvements

Some users suggested we should give a manager the ability to swap the player’s positions (turn a DM into a MD for instance) so that he could be displayed in the “right” list on formations screen. Well, now it’s possible. A swap position action is available right beside the player position in the player info screen. Give it a try!

The amount paid on a player transfer will always be the transfer price, no matter how much a team have offered to the club on its proposal. The purpose of offering a value higher than the transfer price is to make the team which is selling the player raise the transfer price in order to force other interested teams to raise or drop their proposals.

Departments information is now public. You can see any team’s departments level in the team info screen, right below the stadium size. It makes sense if you think of it, everybody knows when a team has a good physio or coaching department in real life :-)

Unlimited substitutions on friendly matches! Well, not exactly, the limit is now the number of substitution strategies you can create, currently 10. Should be enough, specially compared with the limit of 3 we had so far.

When a team balance becomes negative, the following steps will happen to revert the situation (notice the process stops as soon as the balance becomes positive again):

1) Physio department will be downgraded
2) Coaching department will be downgraded
3) Transfer listed players will be “sold” and will retire, highest wages first (at least 14 non-youth players will be left)
4) Non keepers players will be "sold"and will retire, highest wages first (at least 13 non-keepers, non-youth players will be left)
5) Keepers players will be "sold"and will retire, highest wages first (at least 1 non-youth keeper will be left)
6) Loaned players will be "sold"and will retire, highest wages first

If that’s not enough, the manager will be fired and the team restructured:

1) Wages will be reduced to normal levels when applicable
2) Money injection so the team is back on regular financial situation

Dimension specific forums created. Now we have a place to discuss dimension specific subjects like players for sale, interesting matches discussion, championships won, etc. A Dimension Forum icon is available inside a dimension in the top right corner, right beside the existing Forums icon, it will take you directly to that dimension specific Forum.

Who says you get nothing on our anniversary? I tried to deliver more but I didn’t have enough time, sorry guys! I am planning one more pack of improvements soon. But here is what we have today:

UI
- Better checkbox alignment/appearance

Formation Strategies:
- More generic condition (RedCard/Injury on any player)
- A match action can be specific to a home, away or just apply to all types of matches
- Can edit an existing strategy
- Can create a new strategy using another one as template

Individual Tactics:
- Implemented first draft (will activate those on our match engine very soon)
- Still not too graphical, but already can alter the position of a player during
an offensive / defensive situation

Other
- When accepting a friendly, can already select the wanted formation

Thanks to Javier Palacian we now have RubySoccer translated to Spanish, you can change your language in the user settings page to ‘es’. You have to login again for the changes to take effect. Now your Spanish-speakers friends which don’t speak English have no excuses to not play RubySoccer. Spread the word and bring them to have some fun with us! ;)

We have German and Portugal’s Portuguese translations going on right now. These will be announced as soon as they’re ready. If you wanna volunteer to translate RubySoccer to your language just send us an in-game message or post a message in the Improvements Discussion topic.

Philipp Leibeck has made the German translation and Filipe Silva made the Portugal’s Portuguese translation. They’re still reviewing the translation, but if you speak any of these languages feel free to help them improve it, as some sentences / words might be inaccurate due to lack of context during translation. Spread the word to your German and Portuguese friends! They now can play RubySoccer on their own languages.

In about 1 hour you’ll see a new skill on your players: headers. This new skill will be used on high ball disputes and on headers towards the goal. Keepers will use this skill instead of keeping to defend a header. We were going to wait until the end of FastTicker season but then we realized it would be good to have this as soon as possible in the game.

For simplicity all existing players will have 80 in header skill, without chance of improving it. For new players the header skill will behave the same as the other skills. There is no easy way to add an attribute to existing players, that’s why we decided to give everybody the same value, sounds fair enough.

Match logic has obviously changed with this new skill, now any player in L or R sides tends to run with the ball rather than passing it. This will still be based on the passing frequency strategy you set up, but for wingers the frequency is a little less than what you set up so that they can make crosses into the opponent area. Header disputes can happen in any high ball, coming from goal kicks, free kicks, corner kicks or crosses. High balls can result in headers “shots”, header passes or the player who wins the header dispute will simply get the ball and run.

When a player improves the chance of improving a higher number of skills at once has increased, as now we have one more skill to improve. The game help will be soon update with the new values.

It’s only the first phase of the “header system” and your feedback is very important in order to improve that. We’re confident that this will open lots of new strategy possibilities. Let’s have some fun!

It’s now possible to prioritize your job applications when applying for more than one team. Simply drag and drop the applications in your manager info page. The decision of who gets the job when more than one manager is applying for the same team has also changed and is based on manager ranking, board rating and time since joined dimension. More details in the game help in English or Portuguese .

Newspaper on the way! Our first newspaper section is Managers at risk, there you’ll find a list of managers whose job is at risk and will be able to apply for a job on their teams. This application will only be processed if the manager end up being fired, if his/her performance gets better you’ll receive a message saying your application was rejected.

By the way, managers are now fired only if somebody is interested in managing his/her team.

Merchandise value calculation has been changed to reduce the difference between the big clubs and small clubs. This may sound strange right now but remember that when smaller countries are added today’s small clubs will probably become big or medium clubs and the small countries clubs would receive a ridiculous merchandise amount like 10 or 20 (not 10k, 20k) using our previous formula. With this change, most teams will start receiving a higher merchandise income, top teams shouldn’t be much affected.

Another important related change is the board expectation and manager performance evaluation, starting next season. The way the board looked at the squad was not very realistic. As an example, an attacker with shooting 90 and 50 in all other skills would be considered better than an attacker with 89 in all skills. Now the player is evaluated considering all his skills, even though the main skill is still more important and each position has different weights for secondary skills.

Following yesterday changes we now have new calculations for sponsorship, merchandise (again), player wages and player values. Again, the reason for these changes are to prepare the game for more countries with realistic values for poor teams and players. Let’s look at each change separately.

Sponsorship: hasn’t changed much, shouldn’t even be noticed
Merchandise: we moved back to a value similar to what we had before…maybe the value will decrease a little for top teams
Player Expected Wage: won’t change much for good players, top players wage can raise a little while average and bad players wage will probably rise
Player Estimated Value: will definitely rise for most players

New department added: Scouting. In your Stadium information page you’ll now be able to build and upgrade a scouting department, like we already have for coaching and physioterapy. This department gives you a tool in the Search page to look for players using detailed criteria. Complete information about scouts can be found in the game help.

We finally found a good formula for player estimated value calculation. It will change dynamically based on the transfers between human managed teams and its parameters are dimension specific. All other calculations like wages, merchandise and sponsorship remain the same for now.

Managers are now able to select corner kick, free kick (direct shots) and penalty kick takers for each formation. If you select a player that is not available during the match the old rules will be used (best passing for corners, player who suffered the foul for free kicks and penalty kicks). For now what matters for corner kick takers is passing, for penalty kick takers is shooting and for free kick takers (shots) is 80% shooting and 20% control.

The unfinished Statistics Computer is available! Unfinished because I wanted to start receiving feedback on what else you guys think it would be interesting to have there.
For now it is possible to see the statistics of 5 teams/managers using the following criteria:
- Include or not friendlies
- Only include games that were played against a specific team
- Only include games that were played against a specific manager (you have to user the forum user name there for now)
- Only include games that were played against a specific team and manager

Some minor improvements we did today:
- Show points on ranking screen
- Statistics computer stores the “against” criteria on refresh and look for the manager name, not the forum name
- Fixed a couple bugs on the history tables

Player positions on match report now reflect the teams starting line-up. There was some misunderstanding when the formation and players position displayed didn’t match due to individual tactics or strategies. For example, before this change, if a team’s formation was 4-4-2 but at the 45th minute there was a strategy to move a defender to the attack the players position in the match report would make you think the formation used was 3-4-3.